Conversations with heart, hand, eye and mind: Art-making as a transformative research approach for an art educator

This dissertation includes a creative project consisting of thirty-seven visual explorations that use art-making to research art accompanied by a contextual essay. It is a visual study that offers the argument that art-making as a research modality in art education affords a flexible waxy to synthesize new learning and process information on the doctoral level. Art-making for this particular project, specifically concentrates on its use when looking for ways to modify undergraduate art education curriculum frameworks so that they are more diverse. Through a series of five art-making research investigations a systematic sequence of complex and rich data emerged. The research began with a group of art-making experiences identified as Ritual/Temporary processes that investigated art-making as process. Along with that inquiry, a second unit employed hands-on visual explorations into non-Western Alternative Aesthetics to study what impact approaching the creative process from non-Western perspectives would have. Following these two initial investigations, Eckert applied the information gleaned from their data to her personal artwork in a series of exploratory visual pieces preceding each with ritual preparation in the form of body-marking, chanting and drumming. From these first three inquiries and the data collected, Eckert embarked on a fourth exploration of art-making as it specifically related to research as both data and a means to gather data. The concluding inquiry was a group of visual investigations into possible applications of art-making research for fellow art educators and the practice of teaching. An important discovery was the limitations placed on the concept of art and art-making for adults by Western culture. The results of this study in art-making in ways outside the Western canon produced insights and information that suggested ways to modify art curriculum on the undergraduate level for art education that would enable educators to teach more multiculturally, cross-culturally and with less gender-bias.